I believe that what the folks on the front line in Wisconsin needed most was a united national movement amplifying their grievances and demands. They needed a strong national voice framing a very different, more supportive message than the one they’ve been getting from their President and national Democratic leaders. What they got instead can only have hurt Wisconsin’s efforts.

The consistent message from the national Democratic party and President Obama is that “this is the era of austerity.”

As Thomas Jefferson School of Law professor Marjorie Cohn notes at CommonDreams, “Today marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the chemical warfare program in Vietnam without sufficient remedial action by the U.S. government.” More than 3 million people, including Vietnamese, Vietnamese-Americans, US veterans, and their children have either died, sickened or been disabled, and their children may, too, as the result of the wide-scale use of chemical agents by US forces during the Vietnam War.

It’s time to rally for Lt. Dan Choi.

Jane was with Dan in June when Assistant U.S. Attorney Angela George announced that on August 29, the government will put him on trial for protesting Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell last November in front of the White House. To date, Dan has refused to accept the government’s plea deal.

There’s no good outcome here. Either we get a pathetically bad grand bargain that probably has no revenues to speak of, or we get sequestration. The hilarious outcome would be a deal at the end of 2012 to extend the Bush tax cuts in exchange for canceling the trigger cuts, which would absolutely explode the deficit but make a lot of people in Washington happy. But either way, we’re not getting a jobs committee to recommend job creation measures that will go to the Congress for an up or down vote.

This is what the beginning of self-reinforcing downward spiral would look like.

Ratigan’s rant did not pander to his audience with cheap talking points that reinforce tribalist divisions — as well as the status quo. Instead he made everyone profoundly agitated by speaking the hard truths that throw the whole game board up in the air and scatter the playing pieces on the ground.

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed published today, J. William Leonard, who worked for five years as the director of the Information Security Oversight Information Office when George W. Bush was president, calls on the Obama administration to sanction “those who inappropriately classify information, and it needs to take far greater care in what it decides to label secret.”

There are no good choices for this commission. It is designed to protect members of Congress from the electoral repercussions of cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits, something that 82% of the country vehemently opposes. A full 60% of the country think the wars are responsible for the deficit, but the money for war will not be touched. The committee exists solely to impose the will of a small minority of oligarchical elites on the nation, and rob millions of Americans of the retirement insurance they have been faithfully and honorably been paying into their entire adult lives. The fact that the committee exists at all represents the breakdown of the social contract.

There were no real surprises among the choices made by John Boehner and Mitch McConnell for the Catfood Commission II. It’s perhaps interesting to note that Paul Ryan didn’t make the cut, but I guess Boehner figured that he’s toxic and therefore not a good face to put on the committee. Instead, Boehner picked two heads of other committees with jurisdiction over health programs and taxes, and made the chair a member of the original Catfood Commission as well as the House Leadership.

Tom Friedman seems to alternate between days with provocative ideas that challenge conventional wisdom, for better or worse, and days with fantasies built on absurd notions, massive ignorance or delusion, which if implemented would be catastrophic. He’s equally certain and proud of both, so you have to be careful.